Mockingbird

Shot with 7D and 400/5.6L lens. DPP used for RAW conversion, then processed in CS3. ISO 400 image. Apologies for the crummy background.

Very sharp... Good shot Bill.

Nothing wrong with that BG. Looks great Bill!

That is a quality shot

Thanks, Brad, Steve, and Ken.

The bright white from the neighbor's house went right across the middle of the mockingbird in most of my shots and caused color fringing -- luckily, there were a couple with better exposure. Mr. Mockingbird always hangs out around the same spot so maybe with his permission, I can try a different angle today.

I think that winter is officially here in Texas ... I had to put on a light jacket.

hm.... so that's what those critters look like... i always hear them in yard, but never really knew what was making that noise...

+1 nice shot!

Excellent image.

I think its waaaaay too sharp you even have artifacts in the background. But I like the pose here. Thanx for sharing.

Nice shot, Bill.

lilminijpc wrote in post #9128975
hm.... so that's what those critters look like... i always hear them in yard, but never really knew what was making that noise...

+1 nice shot!

Thank you, lilminijpc.

Cyclop wrote in post #9129962
Excellent image.

Thank you, Cyclop.

tomcio wrote in post #9130242
I think its waaaaay too sharp you even have artifacts in the background. But I like the pose here. Thanx for sharing.

Thanks for the comments and critique, tomcio. The only thing that I notice in the background is noise from ISO 400, but you have my permission to edit the image to point out the artifacts that you are referring to. I am open to suggestions for improvement.

I used DPP to convert the RAW image which is not my normal workflow because DPP appears to leave a somewhat grainy "salt and pepper" type noise pattern that I do not get when using ACR to convert the RAW images (However, ACR has its own baggage ever since Adobe decided to add a rotation to the HSL colorspace that supposedly compensates for inherent discontinuities between changes in luminance and maintaining constant hue in the basic CIELAB and HSL color spaces -- while their intentions were good, I do not like the idea of shifting hues without allowing user intervention).

I do not normally use luminance NR because it negatively affects image sharpness, so only a small amount of chrominance NR was used in DPP. In Photoshop, I downsized the image to about 44% of the original size using the bicubic sharper algorithm. There are a couple problems with downsizing an image regardless of the algorithm.

1. The first is a slight loss of sharpness. I compensated for that by applying a very mild amount of USM (Amount = 50, Radius = 0.3, and Threshold = 0).
   
2. The second problem with downsizing an image is that high contrast edges wind up with a noticeable USM type outline. Sometimes, I deal with the latter problem by creating separate layers for the foreground and background and blurring the background layer to get rid of the outline. That is a lot of additional work and I did not think that this image warranted it.

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jgrussell wrote in post #9131710
Nice shot, Bill.

Thanks, Judy.

Nice shot, did you use PS to blur the background ?

gatorbill wrote in post #9132504
Nice shot, did you use PS to blur the background ?

Thanks, gator bill. No, the background was already blurred, but I did some smoothing of the "salt and pepper" noise in the background. I did it the quick and dirty way and did not take great pains to get the noise that was really close to the mockingbird, so if you look carefully, you can see that there is a bit more background noise around the edges of the mockingbird.

wow that is sharp, very nice!

Good one, Bill.